Pentagon in Internal Struggle Over Calling out Salafi Jihadism

Pentagon in danger of allowing reality into strategy

Staffers from Special Operations Command want to include a section on Salafi jihadism in the next edition of the National Military Strategy.

BY ELLIOT FRIEDLAND



From time to time, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the country’s most senior military officer below the commander-in-chief himself, puts out a National Military Strategy. This document is intended for senior American military commanders around the world and sets out big picture strategy guidance for how the U.S. military ought to cope with the myriad threats it may face in the line of duty.

New Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Marine General Joseph Dunford is compiling a new National Military Strategy. Special Operations Command (SoCom), the branch of the military charged with hunting down and killing terrorists, is providing input and expertise to the report.

SoCom is pushing for Salafi jihadism to be discussed in the report as the branch of Sunni Islam responsible for most global terrorism in the world today. It is the ideology shared by the Islamic State and al-Qaeda.

“If you look at threat doctrine from that perspective, it’s a much bigger problem because it’s not just the violent jihadists, it’s the non-violent jihadists who support them,” one person knowledgeable about the National Military Strategy told The Washington Times. “Pretending there is no relationship between the violent jihadists and Islam isn’t going to win. We’re completely ignoring the war of ideas. We’re still in denial. We’re pretending the enemy doesn’t exist.”

Dunford’s staff declined to comment on the upcoming report, which will be classified. The last National Military Strategy, by the previous chairman, General Martin Dempsey, was released publicly on the Joint Chiefs of Staff website.  It did not make mention the ideological roots of terrorism.

Sources close to the team responsible for preparing the National Military Strategy told The Washington Times  Dunford’s staff was not persuaded on the merits of including the term.

Quintan Wictorowicz, one of the architects of Obama’s national counter extremism policy, charted the relationships between Salafi jihadist groups (although he did not use that term) and other sects of Islam in a 2005 academic paper entitled A Genealogy of Radical Islam.

“Al Qaeda and the radical fundamentalists that constitute the new ‘global jihadi movement’ are not theological outliers. They are part of a broader community of Islamists known as ‘Salafis’ (commonly called ‘Wahhabis’).”

He distinguished between violent and non-violent Salafis saying “The jihadi faction believes that violence can be used to establish Islamic states and confront the United States and its allies. Non-violent Salafis, on the other hand, emphatically reject the use of violence and instead emphasize propagation and advice (usually private) to incumbent rulers in the Muslim world.”

Wictorowicz details several important theological points that distinguish this movement, notably the use of takfir to brand the enemies of the jihadi movement as apostates deserving of death and the concept of jahilliya which posits that the contemporary Muslim world is not really Muslim because they follow man-made laws and are therefore akin to the pagans who ruled Arabia before the time of Mohammed.

He names Muslim Brotherhood ideologue Sayyid Qutb as a central figure in the development of this doctrine.

Understanding this application of radical theology to the political sphere helps us to identify why certain groups are dedicated to fighting the United States and helps in setting out clearly the differences between Salafi jihadism and Sunni Islam in general.

German Intel Gets over 100 Tip-offs on ISIS Militants Among Refugees

German security service BfV reportedly received more than 100 tip-offs that ISIS militants had infiltrated the country among refugees, according to a recent report. The news comes as massive nationwide anti-terror raids took place this week.

The head of the German domestic intelligence service (BfV), Hans-Georg Maassen, told a gathering of politicians that the agency had received more than 100 warnings indicating there were Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) militants staying in Germany as refugees, newspaper Berliner Zeitung reported Friday, without citing its sources.

However , some cases of “baseless defamation” were among those tip-offs, Maassen added, according to the newspaper.

No doubt. And most likely some militants were reported by more than one tipster.

German security services have remained on high alert since the November terror attacks in Paris which claimed the lives of more than 130 people.

Earlier this week, police and security agents all across Germany were scrambled to search for suspects allegedly planning a terror attack in the country, with Berlin seen as the most likely target. Well-known tourist attractions including Alexanderplatz train station and the Cold War-era Checkpoint Charlie could be among the targets of a possible attack, according to preliminary media reports.

On Thursday, a police special force unit raided four flats and two businesses in Berlin, detaining four men accused of allegedly having ties to Islamic State. They were suspected of being involved in planning an attack, police spokesman Martin Redlich told RT.

One of the suspects, a 49-year-old Algerian, was arrested in a three-bedroom flat in Berlin’s predominantly immigrant district of Kreuzberg. He was living there on a fake French passport, local media reported, and owned two shops nearby Alexanderplatz and Checkpoint Charlie. Redlich could not confirm the landmarks were the targets, however.

The spokesman said police had acted on a tip-off, but he provided no further details.

Similar raids also took place in the German regions of North Rhine Westphalia and Lower Saxony. In Berlin alone, 450 police officers were engaged in the operation, German media reported.

The main suspect was a 35-year-old Algerian man detained during Thursday’s raid in the town of Attendorn. Said to be a possible leader of an IS terrorist cell, he was also being sought by Algerian authorities over allegations he is a member of the terrorist group.

He entered Germany in autumn 2015, having traveled the so-called ‘Balkan route.’ At that time, the 35-year-old was registered in Bavaria as a refugee.

Both men had been monitored since the end of 2015, after security services had received a tip-off they might be IS infiltrators.

Another unnamed 26-year-old Algerian, who also registered as a refugee and lived in a shelter in central Hannover, is suspected by the police to be the cell’s communication agent. He is also thought to have possible ties to Belgian Islamists. He has traveled to the Molenbeek district of Brussels, known for harboring jihadists, at least once in recent weeks. Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the mastermind behind the November’s Paris attacks, was a Molenbeek resident.

Germany took in over 1.1 million refugees in 2015, and fifty-four percent of Germans believe the terror threat in the country is on the rise because of the high number of incoming migrants, according to the latest Spiegel poll.

I'm surprised it's only 54%. There is still some naivety in Germany. 

In December, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution warned:

Germany is increasingly vulnerable to security threats from the overwhelming refugee influx, new figures show. German security services say over 1,000 Islamists could commit “serious crimes,” and many Germans feel their country is now unsafe.


Around 1,100 radical Islam supporters in Germany are potentially ready to conduct attacks, the head of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Hans-Georg Maassen told MDR radio on Friday. At least 430 of those Islamists are so dangerous that "a serious crime can be expected from them at any moment."

The security chief also warned the number of Salafis who reside in Germany is increasing. “In Germany there are currently around 8,350 Salafis, their numbers have rapidly grown over the past months,” he said, as cited by the Mittelbayerische Zeitung on Friday, adding, “there were 7,900 of them in September.”

Maassen also told the newspaper that domestic intelligence had spotted at least 150 attempts by Salafis to enlist recruits in refugee hostels across Germany.